Popful Mail

About Popful Mail

Popful Mail (1991) is Nihon Falcom's side-scrolling action RPG starring an unlucky elf bounty hunter, later remade for the Sega CD, where Sega almost turned it into a Sonic spin-off before fans objected.

Popful Mail in Depth

Popful Mail is a 2D platform game with RPG elements, though without levelling up. Players jump, attack, open doors and chests and talk to characters, and a menu changes the active character, equips gear, uses items and saves. At first only Mail is playable, but the magician Tatt and the winged creature Gaw join later, and players can switch between them at any time. Mail is the fastest with the lowest jump, Tatt is balanced, and Gaw is slowest but jumps highest and usually hits hardest. Everyone, enemies included, has 100 health points, and ranged and magic attacks drain a blue-grey bar that refills when left alone. Each character can collect up to five weapons, from a sword, dagger and boomerang to a staff, fireball and claw, and items give effects such as invulnerability or footing in snow.

Long ago, three fallen gods, Morgal, Necros and Ulgar, were sealed in a floating tower after a great war survived only by an elf, a human and a dwarf. In the present, the elf bounty hunter Popful Mail beats the criminal golem maker Nuts Cracker, but his body escapes and his head turns out to be a decoy, so she goes after a 2,000,000-gold bounty on Muttonhead, a respected wizard turned criminal. Tatt is his former apprentice, hoping to turn him back.

Making Popful Mail

Falcom released it for the PC-8801 on 20 December 1991 and the PC-9801 in 1992. Sega Falcom's Sega CD remake was announced as Sister Sonic in Beep! MegaDrive in November 1992, but Japanese fans wrote to Sega asking for a faithful remake, so it was cancelled in favour of one with Japanese voice acting, released on 1 April 1994. Working Designs localised that version for North America in early 1995, raising the difficulty and compressing the audio to fit the disc, and it remained the only version released outside Japan until a Switch release of the PC-8801 version in July 2024. A Super Famicom remake, Falcom's first game for the system, followed in June 1994, and a PC Engine Super CD-ROM² version by HuneX in August. Reviewers of the Sega CD version singled out its cinema scenes and voice acting, which GamePro said set its "quirky characters apart", Next Generation gave it three stars, and Retro Gamer later named it among the top ten Mega CD games.